JACOB GRUMET, FORMER JUDGE AND CHAIRMAN OF S.I.C., DIES

By JOAN COOK

Published: June 9, 1987

Jacob B. Grumet, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice and former chairman of the State Commission of Investigation, died Sunday at Beth Israel Hospital. He was 86 years old and lived in Manhattan.

As chairman, Mr. Grumet led an inquiry into charges of corruption in New York City that helped usher in the mayoral election year of 1961, in which Robert F. Wagner was re-elected.

Mr. Grumet, a Republican, left the panel in 1968 to become a judge. He returned in 1976 to head an inquiry into a charge by a former special prosecutor, Maurice H. Nadjari, that Gov. Hugh L. Carey had tried to dismiss him because he had been investigating high-level Democrats. The charge was dismissed for lack of evidence.

Mr. Grumet spent 17 years as a prosecutor. He started as an assistant United States attorney, eventually joining the staff of District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey and helping with the rackets investigations of the late 30's. He assisted in the prosecution of such notorious gangsters as Waxey Gordon and Louis (Lepke) Buchalter.

On the State Commission of Investigation, Mr. Grumet participated in inquiries into the city government under Mayor Wagner; retaliatory charges by the Democratic Mayor that the Republican administration of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller had political motives in pressing for an investigation, and the charge by Mr. Wagner a few years later that the Democratic state chairman had tried to bribe legislators into casting anti-Wagner votes in a complicated leadership fight.

Mr. Grumet was born in Manhattan and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, City College and the Columbia Law School, where he edited The Law Review. He was an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York for four years. From 1935 to 1947, he worked under Dewey and District Attorney Frank S. Hogan, the last five years as head of the homicide bureau. He resigned in 1948 to go into private practice.

In the next few years, he practiced law, served as a State Supreme Court Justice, as Mayor Wagner's Fire Commissioner and as a waterfront labor arbitrator.